It hasn’t been a particularly good month for the grandiose hothead in
the Oval Office. Just as the chaos within the West Wing was starting to
resemble the economy section of a United Airlines flight, the president
dipped into the nation’s pocket and blew $60 million worth of Tomahawk
missiles on an attack on Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad after Trump
was shown images and TV reports that Assad had used what was later
determined to be sarin gas on civilians, including children. The gas
attack was horrific; the U.S. response, impulsive and ineffectual (and a
reversal of Trump’s own stated policy). It told the Syria-Russia
coalition that Trump was unpredictable and given to showy gestures—a
description all too familiar to most Americans these days. More to the
point, it diverted the press and the public’s attention from the
Trump-Putin coalition, which many believe will ultimately be the
president’s undoing.

You’re not alone if you think you are living through an Allen Drury
novel—or, depending upon your age, Dr. Strangelove or Wag the Dog.
Sean Spicer, the poor fellow, is living through his own episode of South
Park. In the B.T. (Before Trump) era, most people I know went about
their daily lives reasonably confident in the knowledge that the papers
or news sites they read that morning were all they needed to stay
informed for the rest of the day. But now, A.T., all that has changed.
Those same people check their phones with the regularity of lovelorn
teenagers—wincing as they look to see what fresh horrors the great man
in the White House has unleashed. Trump may thrive on conflict and
disorder, but most of us do not.

When Doris Kearns Goodwin named her book about Abraham Lincoln’s
fractious Cabinet Team of Rivals, she didn’t just leave it at that.
Central to her theme was the role played by Lincoln himself, who
single-mindedly pursued his vision with skillful opportunism. He drew on
the strengths of his advisers, understood their weaknesses, and as
needed played them off one another.

And now we have Trump, who has assembled his own fractious White House
team. It’s a creature born not of forethought but stitched together from
various body parts collected along the way. As Sarah Ellison points out
in “The Westeros Wing,” with the exception of the two
family members, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, no one else on the
team—not Bannon or Priebus, not Miller, Cohn, Conway, or
Pence—really knew Trump a year ago. They have widely differing
worldviews and political agendas. What unites them is a lack of
experience and a sharp-elbowed personal ambition. They also function (if
that is the right word) in the happy realization that conflict of
interest isn’t something to be avoided but rather the very point of
Trump White House service. Ellison describes the large, omnipresent
flies that buzz around ceilings of the West Wing because the windows,
for security reasons, don’t open. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Of all the White House jobs Donald Trump has filled with his relatives,
one is actually legitimate, with historical bona fides: the unpaid job
of First Lady. As Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg told
V.F. contributing editor Evgenia Peretz—for “He Comes First,”—one of the First Lady’s foremost duties is to “assuage that loneliness” which comes with living in a mansion that President William
Howard Taft called “the loneliest place in the world.”

So far Melania doesn’t get high marks for loneliness-assuaging, having
forsaken the White House for the family’s Trump Tower apartment, in Manhattan—a decision that costs taxpayers around $140,000 a day for
the extra security this involves.

Historically, being First Lady has entailed other important duties.
These include being a role model and championing a worthy cause. Think
of Nancy Reagan and her “Just Say No” to drugs campaign; Barbara Bush
and literacy; Betty Ford and her very public battles against breast
cancer and substance abuse.

About all this, Melania has been as quiet as her husband is noisy. In a
February speech in Florida at one of her husband’s slightly tragic
“Make America Great Again” rallies, she announced she was “committed
to creating and supporting initiatives dear to my heart, which will have
impact on women and children.” Before that, in one of her rare
campaign-trail speeches, she indicated that cyberbullying would be her focus—somehow not quite comprehending that her husband was the
nation’s cyberbully in chief.

One has to feel a twinge—just a twinge—of sympathy for Melania.
After all, the job description for being the consort of Donald J. Trump
didn’t include becoming First Lady. And when she has gamely tried to
pitch in, the Trump brain trust caused her embarrassment, trotting her
out to say that she wrote her own convention speech, which was actually
written (at least in part) by someone else who, it turned out, had
plagiarizedMichelle Obama.

To judge by her official biography, Melania’s record of supporting
charities and causes during her 12 years of being married to a
self-styled billionaire is not encouraging. Details of the good works
she intends to perform have been slow in coming. Perhaps not surprising
for someone who grew up without wealth and modeled her way to the top,
Melania, like the man she married, appears to believe that charity
begins—and ends—at home.